Our climate

Recent one-sided articles in the Sentinel highlighted dire warnings from environmentalists that we must stop climate change now in order to protect our coastal resources.

The soft lie with this assertion is that somehow the climate should never change. Through deliberate or convenient omission, environmental activists imply the Earth's climate has remained constant until now. This is false.

Florida, like other parts of the country, was once covered by water, which is why marine fossils can be found throughout the state.

Sea levels have risen and fallen for millions of years. Furthermore, barrier islands are not permanent land masses, but ephemeral barriers between the ocean and the mainland, which naturally erode in places and accrete in others.

The Earth's climate is affected by numerous factors, including natural cycles, volcanic activity and fluctuations in the Earth's orbit -- factors these groups fail to recognize.

While man certainly plays a role, we are by no means the dominant factor in climate change, which has occurred and will continue to occur with or without us.

It is arrogant, absurd and intellectually dishonest to assert that we can somehow stop the seas from rising or the Earth's climate from ever changing.

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Shawn Keller of Winter Springs has been in the U.S. Army for 22-plus years and is operations officer for a civil affairs battalion in Orlando. His letters typically are about politics, taxes, the military, science or current events.